What’s For Breakfast, And How Hard Did You Work For It?

The Bloomberg index calculates the average cost and affordability of a typical breakfast — one cup of whole milk, one egg, two slices of toast and a piece of fruit — for 129 global and regional financial centers. Rankings are based on market prices for the last 12-18 months from Numbeo.com, an online database of user-contributed city and country statistics.

The index reveals wide affordability gaps between the top and bottom cities in some economic regions. Breakfast costs just over 1 percent of a day’s pay for people in Switzerland’s Zurich and Geneva, while Ukrainians in Kiev must shell out about 6 percent. In Asia, the cost is less than 1 percent in Osaka, compared with 12 percent in Hanoi, Vietnam. The disparity is widest in Latin America: from 2.4 percent in Monterrey, Mexico, to 111 percent in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela.

There’s more in the article, like why they chose eggs, milk, toast and fruit, and a little throw away sentence about what people really eat for breakfast, but still, it was an interesting exercise. I’d be curious about the results of a comparison of what people typically eat for breakfast in each country and how much of a day’s wage that is.

Rice is a more common breakfast food than wheat products in most Asian countries, and fish is often the protein of choice in many places. Here it’s fish or a pork sausage, highly seasoned (and sugary, all the sausage is very sweet).